Penny for your thoughts: the top LGBT organization in my country (and it's a small country, so they're p much The voice for Gays here) is up in arms about the parliament's failure to amend trans legislation. In a nutshell, currently you have to be over 18 and undergoing, or have undergone, medical transition to be able to change your sex marker on official documents. On the one hand, the current legislation supports the exact kind of ~gatekeeping~ (cont)
that i feel i as a radical feminist ought to support, but on the other hand, who’s really gonna care if some burly dudebro has “F” on his passport? Not like he’s going to gain access to women’s spaces in daily life anyway - prison possibly excepted - and it might serve to show the absurdity in opposing “gatekeeping”. Are there some more serious implications that I’m missing?
Hi! Thanks for this interesting question. In general I agree that it doesn’t matter if a dudebro type trans woman gets an F on their passport, because we all have eyes! Haha. Except, that type of thing actually can and does have negative consequences, besides prisons. For example, the reason Colleen Francis wasn’t prosecuted for indecent exposure is because his driver’s license had an F on it.
Another question in my mind, is what is even meant by “medical transition” in this legislation? Does that mean simply declaring that one has “always been female”, even though this is obviously not true? (That's how the Oregon law works, where Francis obtained his "F" id, as far as I can tell.) Does medical transition mean, talked to a doctor about starting hormones but haven't started yet? Does it mean, taking hormones and/or getting surgery, but changing nothing about one’s presentation/behavior? Or does the definition of "medical transition" have some implicit dependence on whether or not the person blends in as the opposite (target) sex?
The fact is, even the strictest understanding of "medical transition" (ie taking cross-sex hormones for a prolonged period, getting genital surgery) doesn't guarantee that the trans person's body looks like the opposite (their target) sex. In fact, many trans women get extensive surgeries (facial feminization surgery, body contouring, breast and buttock implants, voice surgery etc) and still don't regularly pass as female. And moreover, medical transition itself is completely uncorrelated with changes in a person's behavior. And finally, there are plenty of people who transition, legally change their sex, but later detransition and don't change their legal status back to their birth sex. This includes males with criminal records. And to reiterate, for anyone new to my blog - I emphatically do not support legal change of sex designation for any male convicted of physical or sexual violence against women, EVER. cf #DennisWoolbertsLaw
I've thought about the reasons behind legal change of sex designation a lot, and I came to some difficult conclusions. First, I think most trans people seek legal change of sex designation primarily to "prove" to ourselves (and to others) that we "really are" the sex we say we are. Colleen Francis is a great example of the absurdity of that kind of proof, and the reason why "because I say so" legal change of sex designation is actually extremely harmful. Second, many trans people say that having legal documents which don't match their public identity is a safety issue, and many people use the Tyra Hunter case as evidence. However, that's a deliberate misuse. The attending paramedics let Tyra bleed out not because of what her id said, but because when they cut her pants off they saw that she had a penis. Having a "female" id wouldn't have helped at all. And in general, the trans women who are murdered by men tend to be black or hispanic, and sex workers. Despite the fact that many of their murderers resort to the gay panic "I didn't know it was really a man" defense, I think that the vast majority of the time, the killers knew exactly what they were getting. Certainly, there was zero credibility to William Palmer's claim that he didn't know Chanelle Pickett was male, given that he picked her up a street queen bar, where he was well-known to the regulars.
Given those facts, I personally reached the conclusion that legal change of sex designation should be a lot more difficult to obtain. There is no right to pass, and there is no right to force people to experience you the way you want them to. For trans people who physically and socially pass (and let's be clear: this is a very small minority within the current popular definitions of "trans*"), legal change of sex designation allows us our privacy, which is its most important function. This is not a radical solution in any way; it is conservative - it normalizes us in order to hide a very profound difference. But, we live in a conservative world. So ultimately I only think legal change of sex designation makes sense if it will result in "less surprise" - which implicitly implies the legal system is involved in judging a trans person's adherence to physical and sex role stereotypes. I don't like that but at the same time nothing else really makes sense to me, in the world we currently live in.
